Stalinka Revisited

[Russell Valentino]

At 12:44 AM 10/18/2005, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere wrote:
>A more general topic for potentially productive discussion on SEELANGS: is 
>it possible to continue the development of postmodernist theorizing about 
>Russia without realistic regard for the massive traumatization and massive 
>killings of human beings in Russia during the twentieth century?  I wish 
>some of the postmodernist theoreticians on this list would stop lurking, 
>would come out and explain to us old-fashioned philologists (and 
>psychoanalysts) why postmodernist theorizing should be retained.  I am 
>willing to change my mind if there are some interesting and convincing 
>arguments put forth.

I wasn't at the talk, so I'm uncertain about its theoretical assumptions. 
But the last part of this post is certainly worth further discussion. It 
seems to me that the distinction between philology and postmodernist theory 
is incorrectly drawn -- some postmodernist theorists are or have been 
accomplished philologists. At issue rather is an incompatibility between 
discursive formalism and socio-political engagement at their respective 
extremes. The former derives from Saussure's emphasis on the 
inaccessibility of the referent and leads to the differential (as opposed 
to referential) semantics of both structuralism and deconstruction. It is 
the realm of discourse. The latter depends upon claims about concrete 
real-world effects (social injustice, traumatization, and so on). It draws 
a fairly direct line between symbolic representation and lived life. There 
is a middle ground. Plenty of post-modernist theorists in cultural studies 
do not rely on the inaccessibility of the referent and insist on the 
socio-political engagement of their writing. They have been explicating the 
relationships between discourse and politics, or in the context of this 
discussion, "between discursive violence and real violence" (as Professor 
Borenstein put it), since at least the 1980s. Reason enough to "retain" it, 
in my opinion.

Russell Valentino  

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